BloomAPI locks down $2.4M to fix medical record releases

Seattle-based BloomAPI is announcing a $2.4 million seed round led by Founders’ Co-op this morning for its solution to the broken medical records release process. It’s no secret that the entire U.S. healthcare system is held back by antiquated technology — but unlike many competitors, BloomAPI offers a solution that works with, and not against, the old-school technologies that are still the unfortunate reality for the industry.

BloomAPI sits on top of existing systems, integrates quickly and doesn’t cost doctors a dime. As a result of this orientation, the solution doesn’t functionally change any existing human processes. When it comes to privacy, patients are still expected to sign all the same documentation and waivers they traditionally would for record releases — it’s just the conduit for the actual document transfer that has been streamlined.

Michael Wasser, founder and CEO of BloomAPI

The company makes its money by charging third parties, like insurance companies and other vendors, for API access. This allows the company to scale faster across doctors’ offices to give the myriad medical record salve startups a run for their money.

“With BloomAPI, data sharing just becomes simple,” asserted Michael Wasser, founder of BloomAPI in an interview. “This way you don’t even have to question whether a medical record is available.”

To date, BloomAPI has onboarded 300 doctors with access to more than 1 million individuals. That process is clearly more difficult and decentralized than a traditional big-ticket enterprise SaaS contract, but Wasser tells me this is part of his secret sauce.

Other competitors have taken a top-down approach, promising to fix the massive medical records problem by promising interoperability across major hospital groups. Wasser believes this is the wrong strategy, and many players attempting to make it work are getting caught up in complex negotiations with maligned incentives.

“Doctors hear ‘interoperability’ and say this will come but it never actually shows up,” explained Wasser. “We are saying, you already do medical record releases, we just want to make it happen better.”

The company plans to continue to simplify the onboarding process for doctors and begin introducing some machine learning capabilities. If BloomAPI is able to sit on top of disparate systems of record, it would have the opportunity to take a more active role in organizing medical records. Some day this could mean pulling diagnosis codes from paper documents and classifying documents.